7 ms·

Presenterm: Markdown Slideshows in the Terminal

306 points by pea-tear 2y ago

enriquto 2y ago
I wonder how are the large fonts rendered. Are they sixel images or what?
- pea-tear 2y ago
  See the sibling comment. This is a new protocol that the kitty maintainer created and is supported as of kitty 0.40.0, which was just released yesterday. This makes presentations look much more presentation-like now!
mmastrac 2y ago
I was curious how the larger fonts worked in Kitty -- here's the reference for the protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/
- kelvie 2y ago
  Thanks, I was also wondering! I wonder what it would take (politically) to get Konsole to support this (kind of afraid to just file the bug and find out!)
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    VTE based terminals can't support this AFAIK. Kitty draws itself with OpenGL and so supports these things. Iterm2 is also a similar story afaik (and Wezterm and ....)
- naikrovek 2y ago
  Xterm does this via DEC protocol commands. Well, it does this by specifying double-height, double width, or both. Why does Kitty have to do things its own way yet again?
  - edoceo 2y ago
    Maybe cause TTY things are crazy! That mechanism of the computer world is so full of arcane/legacy/defacto "standards" But how to overhaul? WaylandTYU?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Even the old VT220 had large fonts. They were just not used by most applications
campbel 2y ago
Alternative https://maaslalani.com/slides/ https://maaslalani.com/slides/
bryanhogan 2y ago
What is the benfit of doing this in the terminal over tools such as Slidev or Marp which also allow you to make slides based on Markdown? - Slidev: https://sli.dev/ https://sli.dev/ - Marp: https://marp.app/ https://marp.app/
- riffic 2y ago
  marp is rad! kill powerpoint forever by writing markdown slides.
- fgarit 2y ago
  Lots of people want to demo things on the terminal, having your slides in the terminal as well makes things seamless. Also some people just like using terminals for all things.
- jrm4 2y ago
  Are either of these related to s5? What's wild is that I've been using zim-wiki -> html -> s5 slides for years, and still do, and I've completely forgotten "how s5 works?" It's just so easy to do things that way over markdown.
- okonomiyaki3000 2y ago
  I've used both of these a lot, Marp being really easy to get started with and Slidev being a little more complex but well worth the (minor) effort. To me, presenterm doesn't appear to offer any compelling features compared with these.
  - andatki 2y ago
    I’ve used Marp a lot and it’s great. Column layouts and code highlighting are two features Presenterm offers that I don’t think are available in Marp.
- WD-42 2y ago
  I used Presenterm for a work presentation recently. Being able to seamlessly transition from slides to example code in Vim is really, really nice. No need to jungle multiple windows, just terminal tabs or even ctrl+z/fg. Plus it looks really cool.
banku_brougham 2y ago
this looks amazing, goodbye google docs
fitsumbelay 2y ago
very cool +1 for terminal slides
fdafds 2y ago
[flagged]
James_K 2y ago
Turning the terminal into a worse web browser is such a silly decision. I really wish we had better environments for this stuff. Something like MatLab. I suppose achieving such a thing on the ubiquity of the UNIX text streams model would be immensely difficult.
xyst 2y ago
brb re-creating pitch deck with presenterm to take presenterm from OSS to closed/limited/business source licensed software (ie, hashicorp strategy) then IPO. Then rug pull the stonk. Leave retail holding the bag, go on permanent leave, get a golden parachute, then some cookie cutter MBA scumbag takes over and ruins it further. Subsequently gets sold to big tech for pennies, and IP gets shelved. In the meanwhile, FOSS community forks presenterm and a divergence occurs. The rinse and repeat :). The circle of scamming.
ChilledTonic 2y ago
Phenomenal - I've been using patat for this: https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat This has in line snippet execution, critical for how I present - so lets switch to this.
- banku_brougham 2y ago
  Patat looks great, is there a means to export to pdf? Thats one thing I think I need, to be able to share a doc of the slides I present.
rellik 2y ago
Very cool! I see the comments about Kitty. Any other terminals well supported?
- pea-tear 2y ago
  iterm2 and wezterm are well supported as well!
yoshuaw 2y ago
I wonder what the first incarnation of single-page markdown files for slides has been. The earliest I know of is `tslide` by Dominic Tarr, first published in 2012: https://github.com/tslide/tslide https://github.com/tslide/tslide
- rickbyke 2y ago
  Vroom goes back to 2008. It generates slides within vim, and it has a wiki syntax, not markdown. https://github.com/ingydotnet/vroom-pm https://github.com/ingydotnet/vroom-pm
porridgeraisin 2y ago
This looks just so so good. Perfect for my usecase (making presentations for our lab meetings) Gonna try and convert a few of my old ones to presenterm. I'll let you know how it goes.
hknws2023saio 2y ago
I love this, what a wonderful idea
mycall 2y ago
Any chance of adding mermaid syntax for ANSI or ASCII charts?
- pea-tear 2y ago
  Mermaid is already supported natively, meaning the mermaid diagram output is rendered as actual images; no need for ascii diagrams https://mfontanini.github.io/presenterm/features/code/mermaid.html https://mfontanini.github.io/presenterm/features/code/mermai...
  - banku_brougham 2y ago
    This is great if you are fine managing npm packages, seems the only smooth way to install mermaid-cli. I'd say this is a mermaid limitation not a presenterm limitation.
    - pea-tear 2y ago
      Yeah, I'd love to not rely on an npm package but it's unfortunately the only way to do this out of the box.
tombert 2y ago
I'm giving a talk in June, and it might be fun to do it entirely in the terminal. Historically, I've done the slides with Markdown and rendered them to Beamer with Pandoc, and that works well enough, though slightly awkward with transitions. I might get more nerd-cred if I live in the terminal. I'll need to check this one out.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anta40 2y ago
Ahh very cool. Guess I can say goodbye to Power Point/Keynote/etc.
vednig 2y ago
https://termui.sh https://termui.sh
bravetraveler 2y ago
With this, I'm going to get the executives living in the shell as much as I do
phrotoma 2y ago
I've been creating slides with markdown and revealjs for my day job as an instructor for several years. I've also used obsidian and quarto for markdown->slide creation for a handful of meetups / conferences. This month I tried writing a kubecon talk using presenterm and had to throw in the towl after a couple hours of struggling. It's super cool and I want to love it, but I find it too fiddly to get the layout the way I want it. For me it might be easier to just page through a plain text file of ascii art style diagrams or something. I've always been just absolutely dog shit at design stuff. I can't center a div to save my life and I don't understand columns. I need it to be absolutely idiot proof because I'm an absolute idiot when it comes to these things. I guess this is my attempt at encouragement for folks to keep working on these tools because I love the aesthetic but I just can't grok the interface. I will continue to watch this project with interest!
- pea-tear 2y ago
  I would love to hear specifics on how you couldn't get the layout looking how you wanted it to. e.g. do you have a link to the presentation you did? Feel free to shot me an email at gmail, it's easily findeable online.
bartvk 2y ago
Speaker notes seem to need an extra step; start an additional terminal on the laptop screen (not the presented screen), then start the speaker notes instance via a terminal command. PowerPoint understands the difference between your own laptop screen and the external output. Still, good that they thought of including speaker notes, plus this is more flexible in combination with ssh.
Piraty 2y ago
also look at https://github.com/visit1985/mdp https://github.com/visit1985/mdp
banku_brougham 2y ago
Trying to make a presentation right now. In order to render mermaid charts I need to install 'mmdc', or mermaid-cli perhaps -- but this is npm territory and I dont really want to get into the whole node ecosystem, it would be opening a can of worms for sure. Is this the only support for rendering mermaid in presenterm?
- pea-tear 2y ago
  Yes, unfortunately mermaid requires not only node but also a browser instance (!!). I don't like it at all but I don't think there's any alternatives. If you or anyone knows a way of avoiding installing a javascript package to do this please create an issue in the repo!

306 points by pea-tear 2y ago

enriquto 2y ago

I wonder how are the large fonts rendered. Are they sixel images or what?

pea-tear 2y ago
See the sibling comment. This is a new protocol that the kitty maintainer created and is supported as of kitty 0.40.0, which was just released yesterday. This makes presentations look much more presentation-like now!

mmastrac 2y ago

I was curious how the larger fonts worked in Kitty -- here's the reference for the protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/

kelvie 2y ago
Thanks, I was also wondering! I wonder what it would take (politically) to get Konsole to support this (kind of afraid to just file the bug and find out!)
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  VTE based terminals can't support this AFAIK. Kitty draws itself with OpenGL and so supports these things. Iterm2 is also a similar story afaik (and Wezterm and ....)
naikrovek 2y ago
Xterm does this via DEC protocol commands. Well, it does this by specifying double-height, double width, or both. Why does Kitty have to do things its own way yet again?
- edoceo 2y ago
  Maybe cause TTY things are crazy! That mechanism of the computer world is so full of arcane/legacy/defacto "standards" But how to overhaul? WaylandTYU?
wkat4242 2y ago
Even the old VT220 had large fonts. They were just not used by most applications

campbel 2y ago

Alternative https://maaslalani.com/slides/ https://maaslalani.com/slides/

bryanhogan 2y ago

What is the benfit of doing this in the terminal over tools such as Slidev or Marp which also allow you to make slides based on Markdown? - Slidev: https://sli.dev/ https://sli.dev/ - Marp: https://marp.app/ https://marp.app/

riffic 2y ago
marp is rad! kill powerpoint forever by writing markdown slides.
fgarit 2y ago
Lots of people want to demo things on the terminal, having your slides in the terminal as well makes things seamless. Also some people just like using terminals for all things.
jrm4 2y ago
Are either of these related to s5? What's wild is that I've been using zim-wiki -> html -> s5 slides for years, and still do, and I've completely forgotten "how s5 works?" It's just so easy to do things that way over markdown.
okonomiyaki3000 2y ago
I've used both of these a lot, Marp being really easy to get started with and Slidev being a little more complex but well worth the (minor) effort. To me, presenterm doesn't appear to offer any compelling features compared with these.
- andatki 2y ago
  I’ve used Marp a lot and it’s great. Column layouts and code highlighting are two features Presenterm offers that I don’t think are available in Marp.
WD-42 2y ago
I used Presenterm for a work presentation recently. Being able to seamlessly transition from slides to example code in Vim is really, really nice. No need to jungle multiple windows, just terminal tabs or even ctrl+z/fg. Plus it looks really cool.

banku_brougham 2y ago

this looks amazing, goodbye google docs

fitsumbelay 2y ago

very cool +1 for terminal slides

fdafds 2y ago

[flagged]

James_K 2y ago

Turning the terminal into a worse web browser is such a silly decision. I really wish we had better environments for this stuff. Something like MatLab. I suppose achieving such a thing on the ubiquity of the UNIX text streams model would be immensely difficult.

xyst 2y ago

brb re-creating pitch deck with presenterm to take presenterm from OSS to closed/limited/business source licensed software (ie, hashicorp strategy) then IPO. Then rug pull the stonk. Leave retail holding the bag, go on permanent leave, get a golden parachute, then some cookie cutter MBA scumbag takes over and ruins it further. Subsequently gets sold to big tech for pennies, and IP gets shelved. In the meanwhile, FOSS community forks presenterm and a divergence occurs. The rinse and repeat :). The circle of scamming.

ChilledTonic 2y ago

Phenomenal - I've been using patat for this: https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat This has in line snippet execution, critical for how I present - so lets switch to this.

banku_brougham 2y ago
Patat looks great, is there a means to export to pdf? Thats one thing I think I need, to be able to share a doc of the slides I present.

rellik 2y ago

Very cool! I see the comments about Kitty. Any other terminals well supported?

pea-tear 2y ago
iterm2 and wezterm are well supported as well!

yoshuaw 2y ago

I wonder what the first incarnation of single-page markdown files for slides has been. The earliest I know of is `tslide` by Dominic Tarr, first published in 2012: https://github.com/tslide/tslide https://github.com/tslide/tslide

rickbyke 2y ago
Vroom goes back to 2008. It generates slides within vim, and it has a wiki syntax, not markdown. https://github.com/ingydotnet/vroom-pm https://github.com/ingydotnet/vroom-pm

porridgeraisin 2y ago

This looks just so so good. Perfect for my usecase (making presentations for our lab meetings) Gonna try and convert a few of my old ones to presenterm. I'll let you know how it goes.

hknws2023saio 2y ago

I love this, what a wonderful idea

mycall 2y ago

Any chance of adding mermaid syntax for ANSI or ASCII charts?

pea-tear 2y ago
Mermaid is already supported natively, meaning the mermaid diagram output is rendered as actual images; no need for ascii diagrams https://mfontanini.github.io/presenterm/features/code/mermaid.html https://mfontanini.github.io/presenterm/features/code/mermai...
- banku_brougham 2y ago
  This is great if you are fine managing npm packages, seems the only smooth way to install mermaid-cli. I'd say this is a mermaid limitation not a presenterm limitation.
  - pea-tear 2y ago
    Yeah, I'd love to not rely on an npm package but it's unfortunately the only way to do this out of the box.

tombert 2y ago

I'm giving a talk in June, and it might be fun to do it entirely in the terminal. Historically, I've done the slides with Markdown and rendered them to Beamer with Pandoc, and that works well enough, though slightly awkward with transitions. I might get more nerd-cred if I live in the terminal. I'll need to check this one out.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anta40 2y ago

Ahh very cool. Guess I can say goodbye to Power Point/Keynote/etc.

vednig 2y ago

https://termui.sh https://termui.sh

bravetraveler 2y ago

With this, I'm going to get the executives living in the shell as much as I do

phrotoma 2y ago

I've been creating slides with markdown and revealjs for my day job as an instructor for several years. I've also used obsidian and quarto for markdown->slide creation for a handful of meetups / conferences. This month I tried writing a kubecon talk using presenterm and had to throw in the towl after a couple hours of struggling. It's super cool and I want to love it, but I find it too fiddly to get the layout the way I want it. For me it might be easier to just page through a plain text file of ascii art style diagrams or something. I've always been just absolutely dog shit at design stuff. I can't center a div to save my life and I don't understand columns. I need it to be absolutely idiot proof because I'm an absolute idiot when it comes to these things. I guess this is my attempt at encouragement for folks to keep working on these tools because I love the aesthetic but I just can't grok the interface. I will continue to watch this project with interest!

pea-tear 2y ago
I would love to hear specifics on how you couldn't get the layout looking how you wanted it to. e.g. do you have a link to the presentation you did? Feel free to shot me an email at gmail, it's easily findeable online.

bartvk 2y ago

Speaker notes seem to need an extra step; start an additional terminal on the laptop screen (not the presented screen), then start the speaker notes instance via a terminal command. PowerPoint understands the difference between your own laptop screen and the external output. Still, good that they thought of including speaker notes, plus this is more flexible in combination with ssh.

Piraty 2y ago

also look at https://github.com/visit1985/mdp https://github.com/visit1985/mdp

banku_brougham 2y ago

Trying to make a presentation right now. In order to render mermaid charts I need to install 'mmdc', or mermaid-cli perhaps -- but this is npm territory and I dont really want to get into the whole node ecosystem, it would be opening a can of worms for sure. Is this the only support for rendering mermaid in presenterm?

pea-tear 2y ago
Yes, unfortunately mermaid requires not only node but also a browser instance (!!). I don't like it at all but I don't think there's any alternatives. If you or anyone knows a way of avoiding installing a javascript package to do this please create an issue in the repo!